Feeling the heat? How climate changes affect our health and working lives

The following blog is based on a forthcoming article in The European by MBA Health Director and Deputy EDI Director Professor Julie Davies.

The really high temperatures we’ve experienced this month are a useful reminder for us to think about how we incorporate SDG13 (climate action) with SDG3 (good health and well-being) in the curriculum in GBSH.
In 2020, Bill Gates warned “COVID-19 is awful. Climate change could be worse.” Two years earlier, Al Gore stated that “the climate crisis is a public health crisis.” And at the end of last year, despite the drive at COP26 to limit global warming to no more than 1.5°C, a Climate Action Tracker group report predicted that we are heading for a 2.4°C global warming by 2100. 

The problem is that climate change is often gradual and cumulative over a long time with apparently unrelated events reinforcing each other. Climate change is also making a huge impact on businesses and creating opportunities for phenomenal shifts in behaviours and innovations. Business schools are influential in researching and educating students about the future of work and business, yet they seem to be lagging behind with research articles on climate change rarely published in leading business and management journals.

It is incredibly important that business schools educate responsible business leaders to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”: UN sustainable development goal (SDG) 13. Business schools must also address the strategic issue of ensuring “healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” (SDG3) to facilitate other SDGs such as “decent work and productivity” (SDG8). 

How climate changes affect our health and working lives

An editorial published during COP26 in a number of health journals, including the British Medical Journal, stated that global warming exceeding 1.5°C of pre-industrial levels risks “catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse”. 

Higher temperatures have resulted in adverse mental health outcomes, increased dehydration, pregnancy complications, kidney function loss, skin malignancies, and tropical infections which all disproportionately impact the most vulnerable in society. The environmental crisis has also resulted in crop failure, soil depletion, and loss of biodiversity, hindering efforts to reduce undernutrition and increasing water and food insecurity and contamination, conflict, forced displacement, and zoonotic disease outbreaks – an outcome the whole world is now all too familiar with.

Governments, environmental and health professionals, and businesses need to work together to create high quality jobs, improve housing and diet, increase physical activity, and reduce air pollution to create both economic and health benefits using cleaner technologies and transform behaviours in societies. One challenge is for high-income countries, which are disproportionately responsible for the environmental crisis, to fund low- and middle-income countries for cleaner, healthier, fairer and more resilient societies and health and social care systems. 

In the world of work, extreme climates affect workers’ livelihoods, mental health, morale, risks of injuries, infections, and deaths in conditions of heat waves, floods, droughts, sand and snow storms, and fires. Ecological changes from extreme hot and cold temperatures, air pollution, and ultraviolet radiation can result in higher levels of allergens, increasing the risk of asthma and hay fever. Heat waves increase irritability, dehydration and the quality of indoor and outdoor air which affect workers’ commuting and living standards. 

Climate changes also result in individuals exercising less and eating more processed foods which can lead to diabetes. Floods result in drowning and hypothermia, and debris and collapsed buildings during storms injure and kill people. Even increased alcohol consumption and lung damage from barbeque smoke have been cited as consequences of climate change. 

All these negative effects lead to lower levels of productivity, work-related stress, business disruption, and financial and other forms of distress. Secondary effects of climate change on clean drinking water, sewage in recreational spaces, and disruptions to food production and supply, can result in tertiary impacts of migration, violence, and conflicts as individuals seek to escape or better their living conditions.

Practising what we should be professing

Business schools are well placed to work with wider universities, governments, professional bodies, think tanks, and other organisations to manage effective measures to adapt to climate-related health challenges in workplaces and societies more broadly. Deaths of despair – suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver failure – that unemployment rates and inadequate accessibility to healthcare cause are important topics for organisational leaders in making decisions about where to locate workplaces and working conditions. 

There are some interesting curriculum developments in business and management education relating to climate change and more broadly related to Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and the Responsible Research for Business and Management network. For instance, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow offers an MSc in Economics & Policy of Energy & Climate Change. The Oxford climate emergency programme is run by The University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. At Imperial College Business School, there is an MSc Climate Change, Management & Finance and the University of Edinburgh has a Centre for Business, Climate Change and Sustainability. The University of Exeter offers a module in business and climate change which explores carbon markets, changing behaviours, the role of technology, company strategies and adaptation, ethical issues, and economic futures. Also, the Business Schools for Climate Leadership (BS4CL) collaboration with eight founding European business schools is an interesting initiative to help business leaders mobilise their resources in dealing with the climate crisis. These are just a handle of examples for how business schools can address climate change topics in education.

Declarations of a climate emergency in several business schools are also raising awareness of the urgency in how we change not only the business school curriculum but how business schools themselves are managed. In working with healthcare leaders, we can learn from organisations such as University College London Hospital (UCLH) in declaring a climate emergency and implementing green policies, e.g., installing low-energy LED lights, switching to sustainable electricity and recycled paper, increasing virtual consultations, reducing patient and staff journeys, reducing usage of the most harmful anaesthetic gases, and engaging staff to participate in climate action schemes.

By working across disciplines, such as combining insights from medical journals with insights from business and management studies research, healthcare managers and leaders, entrepreneurs, and others interested in global healthcare systems can better address the wicked challenges of SDGs 3 and 13.